- Your TO DO list might be a mile long, but make your daily TO DO only 2-3 items and only work on those. - Break projects up into 5 minute tasks. - Work at the beginning of your day, use up your focus, discipline, attention on work. Then at the end of your day, clean up browser tabs, email, Facebook, etc

"If you can hear someone talking while you’re reading or writing, your productivity dips by up to 66%. Open floor-plan offices distract workers without them even noticing it." Also See #9: 33% drop in assaults when classical music was played in a London station.

habit, cognitive-load = "Leo Babauta writes about living an intentional life. “Many of us go through our days awake, but following patterns we’ve developed over the years,” he says, “Contrast this with the idea of an Intentional Life: everything you do is done with consciousness, fulfilling one of your core values (compassion, for example). Everything is done with a conscious intent.”"

This is the video that Chip sent me on how to combine Getting Things Done with Evernote to create a productivity system. ................... startups-going-above-and-beyond = Just when you thought Evernote was just another note-taking app... (although, this doesn't exactly match this tag, as is not something that Evernote created) - backed up to \media\video\youtube & internet backups

I answered the question, but more importantly, I explained the thought process and philosophy behind my answer.
“Yes refund his money in full. We'll take a little loss. It's important to always do whatever would make the customer happiest, as long as it's not outrageous. A little gesture like this goes a long way to him telling his friends we're a great company. Everyone always remember that helping musicians is our first goal, and profit is second. You have my full permission to use that guideline to make these decisions yourself in the future.”
Process:
1.Gather everybody around.
2.Answer the question, and explain the philosophy.
3.Make sure everyone understands the thought process.
4.Ask one person to write it in the manual.
5.Let them know they can decide this without me next time.
As part of learning it, they had to document it in the manual, and show it to someone else, too. (Learn by teaching.)

business, oracle = Larry Ellison actually got efficiencies from teams. If a team wasn’t productive, he’d come every couple of weeks and say “let me help you out.” What did he do? He took away another person until the team started shipping and stopped having unproductive meetings.

It’s possible to bend Gmail, IMAP and Apple Mail to your will. The following steps describe how to configure things so that Delete acts like Archive: one click (or keypress) archives messages in Apple mail on the desktop and the iPhone.